|
I recently joined Curtis on one of his Underbelly Tours, a tour unlike any other. Most tours show the highlights of a city. Curtis’s tour, however, shows the lowlights of a city. He takes you on the subway up to the South Bronx, which was one of the most crime-infested areas of a city that was rampant with crime during the late 1970’s and 1980’s. He points out places where one would not dare go in those days and shows how these areas have improved, although he emphasizes that some areas shown on the tour are not perfect today.
As a lifelong New Yorker, I was afraid that the tour would be a tourist magnet, sucking in tourists to show them the supposed horrors of New York. Yet although there were some tourists, I was mainly surrounded by fellow New Yorkers. Indeed, you probably have to be a New Yorker to fully appreciate the dramatic improvement in the areas we visited. We saw neighborhoods that used to be run by drug lords, gangs, and pimps. Indeed, we saw shoes hung over a telephone wire, a sign that perfection has not reached the South Bronx. But it is fascinating to think, as Curtis points out, that things that we take for granted on street corners and in train stations, like ATM machines or pay phones, would not have lasted five minutes without being vandalized twenty years ago.
Equally surprising to me is the relevance of the Guardian Angels today. I had heard about the Guardian Angels before the tour but thought they were a relic from an era when New York was run by gangs, the government didn’t care, and the police were debilitated. Yet there are areas in the South Bronx where the Guardian Angels are still needed. New York has poured millions into rehabilitating Harlem and other neighborhoods, as Curtis notes, but the South Bronx has been overlooked, making the neighborhood, although better than it used to be, not ideal. For this reason, Curtis remains a sought-after star in the South Bronx. Scores of people came up to Curtis during the tour to shake his hand and thank him for all that the Guardian Angels do. Thirty years after their start, inner city residents still look to the Guardian Angels.
The new Yankee Stadium, the final sight on the tour, symbolizes how the South Bronx has changed over the last thirty years. But just as the Yankees still play in the South Bronx, other old relics still exist in the area, making the Guardian Angels not an old relic, but a necessity, in the underbelly of New York. |
